Search results

1 – 10 of over 3000
Book part
Publication date: 5 December 2014

Claudius Bachmann

Dealing with the issue of “Can practical wisdom be taught in business schools?,” in this chapter, I argue for an inquiry-based learning approach as a way of improving today’s…

Abstract

Dealing with the issue of “Can practical wisdom be taught in business schools?,” in this chapter, I argue for an inquiry-based learning approach as a way of improving today’s management education. Following along these lines, I initially focus on the current criticism of today’s management education in business schools. Then, I provide an introduction into the recent interest in the topic of practical wisdom by management scholars that emerged as part of an effort to overcome these failures of business schools. These attempts, however, remain on a rather vague or theoretical level and are lacking helpful guidance on how universities might implement this concept into their educational offerings. In order to remedy these shortcomings, I introduce a competency-based three-pillar model of practical wisdom and combine it with an inquiry-based learning approach. A comprehensive scheme highlights how the particular competencies of practical wisdom can be fostered over the successive stages of the inquiry process. Most importantly, by describing a MA-thesis program as a successful example of these ideas in application, I provide concrete suggestions of how to facilitate the growth of practically wise competencies by means of an inquiry-based learning approach.

Details

Inquiry-Based Learning for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences: A Conceptual and Practical Resource for Educators
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78441-236-4

Book part
Publication date: 15 October 2020

Elizabeth H. Gorman and Steven P. Vallas

Although expert knowledge has never been more important, it faces mounting challenges to its validity and authority. In this introduction, we discuss the structural changes that…

Abstract

Although expert knowledge has never been more important, it faces mounting challenges to its validity and authority. In this introduction, we discuss the structural changes that have gripped the professions and undercut the ability of professional workers to exercise the authority they previously enjoyed. Digital technology and specialization, the erosion of autonomy within work organizations, depleted levels of income and prestige, and the rise of self-interested forms of professional practice have all worked to reduce the legitimacy of the professions, transforming the structure of professional work and its place within many advanced capitalist societies. In this context, we briefly describe the volume’s chapters and their contributions to the growing and increasingly timely body of research on professional work and expertise..

Details

Professional Work: Knowledge, Power and Social Inequalities
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80043-210-9

Keywords

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 2 September 2019

Abstract

Details

The Contested Moralities of Markets
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78769-120-9

Book part
Publication date: 15 December 2016

Chris Rowell, Robin Gustafsson and Marco Clemente

We argue that our understanding of how institutions matter has been undermined by a piecemeal approach to temporality in institutional analyses. This paper addresses this…

Abstract

We argue that our understanding of how institutions matter has been undermined by a piecemeal approach to temporality in institutional analyses. This paper addresses this shortcoming in the literature. We bring temporality to the fore by conceptualizing practices, which constitute institutions, as understood, situated, and coordinated in time by temporal structures. We elaborate an integrated framework of temporal structures that consist of three types: temporal patterns, temporal conceptions, and temporal orientations – and outline how each type contributes to the reproduction of practices. We discuss the implications of this framework for sustainability initiatives and conclude by suggesting future avenues of research on the temporal foundations of institutions.

Book part
Publication date: 1 April 2003

Siegwart Lindenberg

In this chapter, governance in organizations is seen primarily as the governance of motivation of employees. It is argued that motivation is steered by cognitive frames (goal…

Abstract

In this chapter, governance in organizations is seen primarily as the governance of motivation of employees. It is argued that motivation is steered by cognitive frames (goal driven definitions of the situation), so that governance in organizations should focus mainly on the establishment and maintenance of frames. The chapter discusses how this may be done and how this cognitive approach to governance can be seen as an integration of transaction cost economics and the organizational behavior approach.

Details

The Governance of Relations in Markets and Organizations
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-202-3

Book part
Publication date: 2 September 2019

Sarah Lenz and Sighard Neckel

German ethical banks have experienced a significant increase in customers, deposits, and lending. They aim to establish a fairer banking system. But the simultaneous pursuit of…

Abstract

German ethical banks have experienced a significant increase in customers, deposits, and lending. They aim to establish a fairer banking system. But the simultaneous pursuit of social, ecological, and economic goals leaves them vulnerable to conflicting orders of worth. The authors examine the normative foundations that ethical bank employees refer to when they describe their everyday practices and identify the specific problems that arise from negotiating between moral principles and economic demands to provide insights into the impacts, constraints, and paradoxes of normatively oriented business practices. Drawing on the theoretical framework of the sociology of critique, the authors assume that moral categories, social processes of interpretation, and justification are an essential part of markets. Ethical banking is characterized by the need to meet both market-limiting and market-expanding requirements, and this particularly becomes contentious when dealing with economic growth. By analyzing ethical banks’ freely accessible documents, the authors first outline the institutional guidelines. In a second step, the authors analyze 27 qualitative interviews with employees of ethical banks to gain insights into everyday lending practices and action-guiding normative orientations. The goal of this chapter is to examine the tensions that may arise from applying normative guidelines under the condition of increasing economic requirements and to disclose the way that ethical banks negotiate between mechanisms of expansion and limitation. The analysis of this chapter points out a paradox of ethical banking: due to the banks’ economic expansion, investments corresponding to their ethical commitments tend to become a luxury they cannot afford.

Book part
Publication date: 23 November 2022

Ai Tam Le

“Academic values” is one of the most popular terms used in the higher education literature. But how do we study academic values? Besides autonomy, freedom, and collegiality, the…

Abstract

“Academic values” is one of the most popular terms used in the higher education literature. But how do we study academic values? Besides autonomy, freedom, and collegiality, the “values” in “academic values” often remains implicit, leaving a conceptual gap in the literature. Moreover, autonomy, freedom, and collegiality may reflect the shared normative expectations as part of the value system of a profession, rather than the value orientation at the individual level. To examine the latter, this chapter proposes a conceptual framework adapted from the studies of work values in applied psychology. As a heuristic device, the academic work value framework consists of six ideal-typical value orientations belonging to three dimensions: work autonomy, social orientation, and value of knowledge. The framework's relevance and usefulness are evaluated by revisiting relevant literature on academic orientations. The result shows a spectrum of value positions in academic work, from the “old school” values to the “entrepreneurial” ones to the hybrid orientations. Overall, this framework provides a potential approach to operationalize the concept of academic values for empirical research. At the same time, as a heuristic device, it is open for reflection, critique, and further development.

Details

Theory and Method in Higher Education Research
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80455-385-5

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 17 December 2003

Bertram J Cohler

Understood as the simultaneous experience of necessarily conflicting attitudes, wishes, feelings, or intentions, the concept of ambivalence has a complex history in psychological…

Abstract

Understood as the simultaneous experience of necessarily conflicting attitudes, wishes, feelings, or intentions, the concept of ambivalence has a complex history in psychological and social analysis. Lüscher (2000) reviewed the history of this concept, initially used in the study of abnormal states, and then generalized to the realm of the usual and expectable in social life. It should be noted at the outset that the term “ambivalence” presents two problems for social analysis: adoption of a term initially intended to portray abnormal states for the expectable course of adult life, and the extension of a concept founded on the study of personal states to social analysis. Consistent with Bleuler’s (Riklin, 1910/1911) initial discussion of the term ambivalence,1 Freud (1909, 1912, 1912–1913, 1914) attempted to resolve the first problem by showing that ambivalence – as the experience of mixed and conflicting sentiments regarding those who are particularly important in one’s own life – inevitably emerges out of the child’s effort to resolve the tension between social reality and his or her own desire focused on the parents of early childhood. At the same time, Freud compounded the second problem by regarding the realm of the social as the personal writ large.

Details

Intergenerational Ambivalences: New Perspectives on Parent-Child Relations in Later Life
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76230-801-9

Book part
Publication date: 17 December 2003

Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer

A cursory look at the contemporary social scientific literature shows that the concept of ambivalence has gained prominence in analyses of contemporary societies and identities…

Abstract

A cursory look at the contemporary social scientific literature shows that the concept of ambivalence has gained prominence in analyses of contemporary societies and identities, and in analyses of interpersonal relationships and interactions. With respect to societal analyses, for example, Bauman has argued that the postmodern habitat “is a territory subjected to rival and contradictory meaning-bestowing claims and hence perpetually ambivalent” (Bauman, 1992, p. 193). “To live with ambivalence,” Varga suggests (Varga, 2001), is the postmodern pronouncement. By using ambivalence as an “interpretive category” rather than as a “research construct” (Lüscher, this volume Chaps 2 and 7), however, sociologists often leave unspecified whether this way of living entails different things for different social actors.

Details

Intergenerational Ambivalences: New Perspectives on Parent-Child Relations in Later Life
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76230-801-9

Book part
Publication date: 31 October 2014

Michael J. Thompson

To defend the thesis that the base-superstructure hypothesis central to Marxist theory is also central paradigm of the tradition of Critical Theory. This is in opposition to those…

Abstract

Purpose

To defend the thesis that the base-superstructure hypothesis central to Marxist theory is also central paradigm of the tradition of Critical Theory. This is in opposition to those who see this hypothesis as determinist and eliminating the possibilities for the autonomy of social action. In doing so, it is able to retard and atrophy the critical capacities of subjects.

Design/methodology/approach

Emphasis on the return to a structural-functionalist understanding of social processes that places this version of Critical Theory against the more domesticated forms that consider “discourse ethics” and an “ethic of recognition” as the normative research program for Critical Theory. Also, an analysis of the purpose and logic of functional arguments and their relation to Marx’s concept of “determination” is undertaken.

Findings

The essence of Critical Theory hinges upon the ways that social structures are able to deform and shape structures of consciousness of modern subjects to predispose them to forms of domination and to view the prevailing hierarchical structures of extractive domination as legitimate in some basic sense.

Research limitations/implications

The foundations of Critical Theory need to be rooted in a renewed understanding of the relation between social structure and forms of consciousness. This means a move beyond theories of social practices into the realm of social epistemology as well as the mechanisms of consciousness and their relation to ideology.

Originality/value

Few analyses of the relation between the base and the superstructure or material organization of society and the social-epistemological layer of consciousness delineate the mechanisms involved in shaping consciousness. I undertake an analysis that utilizes insights from the philosophy of mind such as the theory of intentionality as well as the sociological approach to values through Parsons.

Details

Mediations of Social Life in the 21st Century
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78441-222-7

Keywords

1 – 10 of over 3000